


Circles

by Nevi



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Circle of Magi, Friendship/Love, Multi, The Circle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 08:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5040814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevi/pseuds/Nevi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there is anything she should have learnt from the circle it is that stone is a prison, not protection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circles

She remembers this.

The boy’s fingers curl tightly around the embroidered pillow between his hands, his red cheeks streaked with dirt and tears. She takes his hand, cold against hers as the First Enchanter instructs and pulls the boy from the room. He doesn’t tell her his name when she asks. He doesn’t speak at all. The only sounds are his great hiccupping breaths that echo off the stone as she leads him to the apprentice rooms.   She leads him to the bunk beside hers. The bottom one empty since Alanna was taken by the shadows of night.

The blonde boy is long limbs and lanky strides, towering over her; but when he curls into himself on the bunk he looks so, so small. She wonders at his age. Maybe twelve to her eleven. Old enough to remember home and hearth. Young enough to cry.

But then they all cry don’t they? She sits on her bunk for a long time watching, letting her feet kick listless in the air between them. He’s put his back to her and she watches the subtle shaking of his shoulders. She wonders what he did to be brought here. Was it ice from his fingers, was it fire?

She never does learn his name. They call him Anders. He makes her laugh. He tells her about sunrises and rain. She tells him she remembers roses; a little brother with dimpled cheeks. But her memories are faded, the colours drained by the stone that surround them, the walls that tower into the sky. His are still crisp and she can almost see it when he talks, can smell the rain and feel the warmth of the sun.

They doodle Templars being eaten by large cats in the margins of texts and sing lurid versions of chantry songs, much to the disdain of the revered mother. One day he tells her of his plans to escape. She says nothing. Too scared to leave the walls that have been not only a prison but a home.

She doesn’t go with him.

He doesn’t make it far. Jowan tells her they’ve put him in solitary. When he’s brought back to the apprentice quarters, another has already been given his bunk.

The years pass and he falls laughing from the bunk. He has escape on his tongue and love in his throat. She’s never been in love so she can’t understand the want and need in his eyes when he tells her about him: the enchanter that has caught his attention.

She doesn’t see much of him after that.

She sits in the library with Jowan and they read through the texts, sometimes she tries to get him to draw in the margins and sing lurid chantry songs too. But his eyes and heart wanders the same as Anders and she does not miss the longing look in his eyes when a pretty girl walks by.

She is alone when she runs into want. A collision near the bottom of the stairs. A pretty Templar with curls the colour of wheat and the scent of elderflower. This she knows because she accidently knocks his helm from his head in the fall, as his armour takes the brunt of the impact. He smiles at her and she can’t help but smile back.

After that she too is guilty of long looks and a treacherous heart.

Months pass, then a year. She finds she hasn’t seen Anders in near as long, she wonders if he really escaped this time or if he is just another soul taken by the shadows of night. Jowan becomes elusive as well. One by one they seem to leave, and soon she finds herself screaming, alone, in an upper chamber.

She grows restless, the stories of the world beyond the tower walls dig deep, the seeds nurtured in the hidden recesses of her heart by want and hope.   They grow strong in her, germinating defiance, grown by frustration and fury.

This time when escape is on a friend’s tongue she does not hesitate to let it leap to hers.

She still does not know what love is, but she lets another’s spur her forward in rebellion. Rebellion that ends in blood and tears; and she finds in the end that she merely trades one prison for another.

Of this new prison she is a warden, the bars: a song that plays in the blood. And for the first time in over a decade she feels rain on her skin, the droplets building with the crescendo in her veins.

She grins at the grey skies as she tastes the rain on her tongue, and despite the taint singing death beneath her skin, she has never felt more alive.

She experiences waterfalls and mountain ranges. Great battles that leaves her with blood nearly as spilt as the enemies. She travels for days until she nearly collapses from exhaustion, and still every day she wakes in wonder of this new life.

Her travelling companions grow one by one, a found family stitched together through war.   Another prison to call home.

It is months before her travels take her back to the start, back to a tower of stone, black against the dusk.

The tower is not how she left it.

She sees friends and foes alike dead at her feet. Her heart falls with them, bleeds out at her feet and buried beneath ugly words from a pretty mouth. Another victim of war.

She thinks she is stronger for it when she leaves, but she does not see the fissures that only make her weaker.

Fissures that only grow deeper at the sight of a friend locked behind bars of steel. Jowan looks at her wide eyed from his new prison, one that he has built for himself this time; beneath the cliffs of red. She wonders if it is simply the fate of all mages to eventually cage themselves, as they are caged by the power they wield. But she has left her heart at the tower and she finds that without it there is too much of a chasm between.

When he is taken forcibly back to the circle, she is only glad she has never made the mistake to fall in love.

She replaces her heart with stone.

Builds walls around it as the days grow longer. But it is so much harder to carry such a heavy heart and she finds herself suffocating under the weight.

She pulls her cloak tighter around her as she stands beyond the warm glow of the campfire. Collects herbs from the forest floor. The thickening dusk sings its own song: Crickets in the grass and wolf howls. She lets her own voice twine with the night, breathless whispers that turn to smoke in the cold. Old songs and old promises that spill from her thoughts in a torrent, a breaking dam that leaves a flood across the plains of her face.

Alistair finds her then. She is not as hidden by the shadows as she thought. She knows his tainted blood as her own, and when he lays a hand gently on her shoulder she find she has not the strength to remove it.  

She has always considered her grief a private thing. Had done her best to appear as stoic as the mountains, to hide the rivers that erode the façade. But when he wraps his arms around her she crumbles into them. Her stone heart fracturing in the avalanche. He is the mountain for her and when she lays her troubles on him, he does not falter under the weight. And when the waters slow and she is finally able to breathe deep, icy air filling her lungs full. She finds truth in the adage of sharing ones burdens. He carries them without complaint and she wonders for a heartbeat if that is what love is.

The fire is warm when they return to it with words unsaid. She falls asleep with her head in his lap and a hound at her feet and she wonders briefly as her eyes close on the evening: if this is what a home feels like.

She knows her new family is a prison, a liability to her heart. But there is new laughter in the days that follow. A shell cracking beneath her breast. She may have never fallen in love but her heart remembers what love feels like, and it aches. If there is anything she should have learnt from the circle: it is that stone is a prison, not protection. But she is a coward. Too scared to give up the shelter she has known too long. She does not let the stone crumble so easily.

There is a rose, like that of her memories, like that of fairy tales, with a kiss to match. A seed to take root but not to flower.

Ahead is more blood and battle. More monsters and demons. Mud in her boots and starlight in her eyes. Tavern drinks with tavern girls who taste of freedom and the sea. But there is not love. Never love.

Never love.

The days and nights culminate in the warmth of a fire place and a discussion with a witch. Death is knocking against the prison of her blood, the staccato sound rattling in her throat. She does what the witch commands. For her life. For his. His amber eyes have love’s softness in them when she speaks, as half-truths roll from her tongue. In the end he does what she asks, despite the trepidation in his steps.

She sits alone for a long time, a hand splayed across her chest as if a wound has opened there and she must stem the bleeding. Without her knowledge a seed called love has grown in the crevices of her heart. Its roots digging deep as it struggles to break against the stone. To bloom.

Alistair finds her like that, after. He sits with her on the edge of the bed saying nothing. They still expect death on the horizon, and there is nothing left to say in the dawning light.

Her fingers curl tightly around the sword in her hand, heavier than her staff. Cheeks stained red by exertion, by dirt, by tears. She remembers this.

On top a tower not unlike the circle she called home, an archdemon falls. A litany of names spill from her lips as blood spills from her sword, soaking her leathers black. Everyone, everything that she knows lost repeated until her throat is raw, until pain ebbs the flow and she falls.

She dreams of a boy with dark hair not more than a year older then herself. His hand is warm on hers as he leads her to the apprentice chambers for the first time. She dreams of her own hand leading a blonde boy the same, of an elf girl with eyes as big as saucers. Of a Templar with a kind smile and stuttered speech. She dreams of stone that falls away into light. Of a heart that beats as red as roses.

She wakes with a heavy warmth on her hand. Calloused fingers curled around her own. The morning sun filters bright into the room, scattering shadows. A head rests against her arm, face turned from her and she reaches across with her unbound hand to run fingers gently through familiar sun kissed locks. Alistair’s expression is muted by sleep when he turns to face her. A barely stifled yawn that becomes the first words between them in days. A sound that rolls into laughter, caught up in the moment of being alive. And when he presses rough lips to her brow, she sighs contently.

She has never been fool enough before to fall in love. She knows what it can do. That it can destroy. But slowly, ever so slowly she has begun to learn it can also strengthen. The fissures in her heart healed stronger by it, and she thinks maybe, just maybe, love can be a worthy risk to take.

Months later, long after titles are laid upon her like crowns, she is sent to a keep by the ocean. A heart unbound by stone spurs her feet forward into new but familiar chaos. She tastes air heavy with salt and fire, and in the smoke and ashes she finds that what she once thought lost.

A man with long blonde hair, a man whose fingers curl tightly around the staff in his hands as they did around a pillow so long ago. A man who smiles, who – _I remember you._ She walks past the fire that has sprung from his hands, the death left in his wake.

She takes his hand warm in hers and leads him from the room. He’ll never go back to the circle, nor shall she.

She knows this.


End file.
